Absurd Creature of the Week: Pink Fairy Armadillo Crawls Out of the Desert and Into Your Heart

Its massive claws make short work of the substrate through which it digs. They're so big, in fact, that the armadillo, like the town drunk, struggles to walk on hard surfaces. Image: Mariella Superina

The pink fairy armadillo has extremely fine white hair for thermoregulation. And I ain't even mad about its weird claws. Just look at that critter. It's like magic – with enormous claws. Image: Wikimedia

The pink fairy armadillo's tail acts as a kind of "fifth leg," affording it better stability while digging with its forelimbs. Admittedly, it's not the cutest bit of the animal. But no one is perfect. Image: Mariella Superina

It uses its flat bum like a tractor, compacting the dirt behind it as it advances underground. Image: Mariella Superina

Before J. M. Barrie introduced us to the charmingly cranky and vindictive Tinker Bell, fairies had traditionally been cast as vicious scoundrels hell-bent on stealing your kids and tearing up that lawn you paid so much money for. Today the fairy is a decidedly more whimsical, endearing creature, and nowhere is it more legendary than in the deserts of Argentina.

Here dwells the remarkable pink fairy armadillo (Chlamyphorus truncatus), a 5-inch-long, quarter-pound critter with a rosy shell atop silky white hair. This smallest of all armadillos spends almost its entire life burrowing through the earth, hunting various invertebrates and chewing up plant matter. It is a rarely seen, almost totally unstudied marvel — what you read here is pretty much all we’ve observed about the pink fairy armadillo.

So exactly how elusive are they? Conservation biologist Mariella Superina of Argentina’s National Scientific and Technical Research Council has been studying other armadillos in the pink fairy’s habitat for 13 years and has never once seen one in the wild. And locals can’t tell her how to track them. The only specimens she gets are injured ones found and brought in for rehabilitation or those confiscated from chuckleheads keeping them as pets.

Unlike in all other armadillos, the pink fairy’s shell is not fully attached to its body, instead connecting with a membrane that runs along the spinal column. The thin carapace’s underlying blood vessels actually show through, giving it that beautiful hue that you’re now reconsidering being beautiful because it’s made of blood.

The shell’s fragility and flexibility suggest the creature doesn’t rely on it as armor, as other armadillos clearly do. Instead, “it is well possible that it helps them thermoregulate, like a fennec fox’s ears,” Superina wrote in an email interview with WIRED, “as I’ve seen the carapace color change quite rapidly with changing environmental temperature, which was due to an increased (or reduced) irrigation in the blood vessels.”

Exposing more blood to cool air or soil, for example, would lower the animal’s body temperature, while draining the carapace would help it better retain heat. This would prove useful because the tiny pink fairy armadillo has a higher surface-area-to-volume ratio than a large critter, and will thus lose heat more rapidly. According to Bergmann’s rule, this is why we tend to find — with some exceptions — larger creatures like polar bears in cold environments and smaller ones like pink fairy armadillos in deserts.

Now, other than being a big no-no after Labor Day, white and pink might seem odd colors for a desert-dweller. Here, one must blend in with the surroundings or risk predation, but the pink fairy armadillo never spends more than a few moments above ground. It’s an extremely well-adapted burrower, tunneling just 6 inches below the surface in a real-life version of Dig Dug, only the pink fairy armadillo doesn’t hunt by pumping its prey full of air until they explode — as far as scientists can currently tell.

It’s been written that the pink fairy armadillo is a sand-swimmer like the sandfish (which isn’t a fish on account of actually being a lizard), but according to Superina this isn’t the case. Instead, it’s burrowing through relatively firm earth with its enormous claws — so enormous, in fact, that the critter has a difficult time walking on hard surfaces.

Because its forelimbs are tied up in digging, the pink fairy armadillo has a sort of club tail that helps it balance as a “fifth limb.” It’s also equipped with a butt plate, with which it compacts the dirt behind it as it advances forward, “thus closing the burrow and leaving an ‘empty space’ in front of them that allows them to breathe and explore the environment,” said Superina. “I suspect this also helps them prevent burrow collapses.”

A pink fairy armadillo demonstrates its digging and butt-shoveling. This is in black and white, but trust me, the armadillo is actually pink. Video courtesy Mariella Superina; GIF by Nurie Mohamed/WIRED

Yet even with those huge claws and busy little tractor bum, the pink fairy armadillo can hit insurmountable substrate. “The majority of reported sightings we’ve received are from animals that were trying to cross a road or track, or appeared in the middle of a village,” she added. “The most probable explanation is that the [pink fairy armadillos] encountered a hard substrate through which they couldn’t dig, emerged to cross the obstacle, and were seen by someone.”

This is where the creature runs into trouble. Attempting to cross a road, the pink fairy armadillo is often either killed outright or, perhaps just as fatefully, picked up by a human. If it’s lucky, it gets taken to the authorities, who call in Superina. But if kept as a pet, it’ll almost surely die from stress or the inability to adapt to an artificial diet. Superina estimates that 95 percent of pink fairy armadillos in captivity die within eight days.

And just like the earthworms I once collected and did mean things to after rainstorms (I’ve since publicly apologized), pink fairy armadillos can be reliably expected to make appearances during wet weather. While only 8 inches of rain may fall in a given year in its environment, when storms come they’re an intense soak that inundate burrows and force the armadillo to retreat to the surface.

In addition, they may be surfacing because “if their fur gets wet, this will affect their thermoregulation — armadillos in general have problems thermoregulating,” said Superina. She also notes that another desert armadillo, the pichi, “can get a skin disease when exposed to humid substrate for prolonged periods,” and that the pink fairy may have the same susceptibility.

So we can thus only hope to steal rare glimpses of the incredible little pink fairy armadillo, a creature so scarcely seen that Superina and other scientists aren’t even able to determine if it’s endangered or not. There simply isn’t enough data. For all they know, it could be on the brink of extinction, threatened by human encroachment on its territory.

Or it could actually be flourishing just beneath our feet like the fairies of folklore, perhaps dozens of miles away from the nearest lawn to ruin or children to steal. And maybe that’s been the problem with tracking the pink fairy armadillo: not enough strategically placed babies in the desert. You can never have enough strategically placed babies, really.

Browse the full Absurd Creature of the Week archive here. Have an animal you want me to write about? Email matthew_simon@wired.com or ping me on Twitter at @mrMattSimon.

A pink fairy armadillo finally finds a lawn to destroy. I jest, of course. This little beauty has only the utmost respect for lawns. Image: Mariella Superina